Thom Hartman Talking of Backpack Clubs for Hungry Kids in USA

[RamboLiberal]

Just heard Thom talking about this story so went searching for it. To their credit my local paper had WSJ article. Welcome to Bush America.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06165/698171-51.stm

TYLER, Texas -- Seven-year-old Cody Lozano and his 9-year-old sister Cherokee hurried into their house on a recent Friday afternoon and emptied their school backpacks. On the kitchen table, next to a family Bible and a pile of bills, each child laid out a box of Special K cereal, a carton of milk, a package of peanut-butter crackers, a cup of fruit cocktail, a bag of animal crackers, a carton of apple juice, a pull-top can of beans and franks and one of rice and beans.

It wasn't a weekend homework assignment. It was their weekend breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"Without this food, I don't know what we would do," says their mother, Karen Lozano. In a town where the oil boom once created dozens of millionaires and where azaleas and roses now attract tourists, Ms. Lozano, 41, and her two youngest children sit in a living room beneath a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Family health problems and sporadic work for her husband have reduced their income and increased their expenses, she says.

"Last week it was, 'Do we buy groceries or pay the water bill?' This week, it is groceries or the gas bill," she says. "With the backpacks, I know that at least there's something for the kids to eat."

[bleedingheart]

1. that breaks my heart....

and yet there are people who think the "economy is just great"

[Union Thug]

2. I endorse Emma Goldman... TAKE BREAD...

principle of expropriation and all that. I'm serious, I'm sick of this kind of shit and have no problem with people stealing from corporations to feed their families. I guess I'm not a 'law and order liberal'.

[w8liftinglady]

3. Our country is going to shit.I think jesus would rather we focus on this

..than gay marriage.

[w8liftinglady]

4. for some reason,this REALLY bothers me.I feel really bad for these kids.

How much worse is this going to get?

[w8liftinglady]

5. Kicking one more time...keep it going.

[dogday]

6. While the rich sit on gold toilets

It's the pure waste of it all, while people like this woman and her children suffer....

[proud patriot]

7. My husband was raised poor like that

His mother raised 4 kids a year apart in age all on her
own . It was feast or famine he said .

[aaronbees]

8. This quote...

just brings me to tears:

"On Friday at lunch, I see a kind of panic in some children that I didn't see before. They eat as much as they can," says Kim Matthews, youth-services coordinator in the Chapel Hill, Texas, school district. "Then on Monday at breakfast, they not only eat the food on their tray, but the food on the trays of the five kids next to them."



The sight of that must be hearbreaking :( ... I live just a couple hours from Tyler and the economy they describe is the exactly the economy I see around me, one that leaves many behind in the throes of a silent epidemic that's tearing families apart. When our children our hungry, there's something very, very wrong with this economy.

[MissB]

9. I heard about programs like this a couple of years ago.

Heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. How sad that such a wealthy country still has so many desperately poor people. :cry:

[w8liftinglady]

10. kicking for the weekend-let people in your community know about this